Why I can’t stand KDE
I finally put my finger on what drives me nuts about KDE. It’s so petty and trivial: all of the applications insist on starting with the letter “K”. Not only is it absolutely ridiculous, but it makes finding anything impossible. “KEdit”, “KMail”, etc. It reminds me of the “Mortal Kombat” games. KSeriously.
J.Ja
Categories: Linux, Open source
Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit, GNOME 2.26 with compiz, New Wave theme and Compiz (openGL) makes for ‘the best’ Desktop GUI experience, my GUI of choice.
This coming from a former KDE 3.5.x devotee.
I don’t Gnow of any software which doesn’t start with a ‘G’ in the the name. Gcash, GEdit, and the list goes on from there like you Gnu it would. Sometimes the wit cuts like a Gnife.
I actually tried GNOME a bit before KDE ages ago. It wasn’t much better, but at the time, I was not focused on trying to use it as a desktop, I just wanted to give the guy in the office an easy way to monitor some long running SQL tasks and kill them if needed.
To me, the themes, display managers (or whatever stuff like Compiz is called) etc. are the least of my concerns, in trying to evaluate these things. It’s a matter of, "can I get my work done?" And in KDE, the answer too often is "no" due to minor annoyances. Like prefixing everything with "K".
I might give GNOME a try soon. It’s been nearly 3 years since I put this PC together (it’s amazing to me that Vista has been out so long, it still feels new to me, and my Vista install has aged pretty gracefully), which means a hardware refresh is coming soon. And that in turn prompts me to reevaluate OS choices. Assuming I have the funds to do what I want with my infrastructure here (put together a new desktop, turn my current desktop into a Windows 2008 R2 server, virtualize my FreeBSD server onto the 2008 box with Hyper-V), I’ll have a decent little low end PC just sitting around doing nothing, just waiting for me to experiment with other OSes.
J.Ja
Totally agree, the cutesy approach that seems to permeate all Linux distro’s makes it a real hard sell for the business environments, the Birkenstock and ponytail crowd will just never get it. The perceived lack of professionalism and maturity that this creates will keep Linux out of the mainstream pretty much forever. Personally if I wanted that kind of experience on my business desktop, I could just install the My Little Pony extensions to XP and not be too far off the mark
If the naming convention is more important than the quality of the desktop environment, than that’s a really sad way to judge things.
I mean, I can go on complaining about your OpenOffice-Is-A-Pig posts, but that doesn’t affect my opinion about the quality of your other posts.
John -
Check the byline, please. I think that you are confusing me with George; I’ve never posted (to the best of my recollection) any posts on OpenOffice, good or bad. But yes, regarding KDE, I do think that in this case, the naming convention really does affect the user experience in a negative way. It makes it hard to find things, it makes the system feel juvenile. When you sit down to try to learn or use the system, it’s this rediculous stumbling block, created for no explicable reason.
J.Ja
I like the way Ubuntu’s gnome install keeps things simple by naming applications according to their function – Text Editor, CD Burner etc.